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Professor Lively Receives DOE’s Early Career Award

Professor Lively Receives DOE’s Early Career Award

June 28, 2018

Ryan Lively, an assistant professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Chemical & Biomolecular Engineering (ChBE) was recently awarded the Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) Office of Science financial award for Early Career Research Programs. This is the third DOE Early Career Award given to Georgia Tech and the first for ChBE.

He is one of 84 scientists across the nation – 54 at universities and 30 at national laboratories –selected by DOE to receive this funding in 2018. The DOE Early Career Research Program, now in its ninth year, is designed to bolster the nation’s scientific workforce by providing support to exceptional researchers during the crucial early-career years, when many scientists do their most formative work.

Through this program, university-based researchers will receive grants of at least $150,000 per year for five years. The grants cover salary and research expenses.

“Supporting talented researchers early in their career is key to building and maintaining a skilled and effective scientific workforce for the nation. By investing in the next generation of scientific researchers, we are supporting lifelong discovery science to fuel the nation’s innovation system,” says Secretary of Energy Rick Perry “We are proud of the accomplishments these young scientists have already made, and look forward to following their achievements in years to come.”

Lively’s proposed experimental work will study the co-movement of organic molecules and water within tiny pores found in disordered carbonaceous materials. This experimental work will help address challenges in the areas of catalysis, geology, and industrial separations, the latter of which is the focus of the work. The experiments and analysis conducted by Dr. Lively and his team will lay the foundation for new membrane-based industrial separations technology capable of augmenting or even displacing existing energy-intensive separations techniques such as distillation.

Lively, who earned his undergraduate and PhD degrees at Georgia Tech’s ChBE, joined the Institute’s faculty in 2013 and won a National Science Foundation CAREER Award in 2017. His current research seeks to advance energy-efficient fluid-separation processes critical to the global energy infrastructure.

He received the DOE award for his proposal “Understanding and controlling water-organic co-transport in amorphous microporous materials.”

Early Career Research Program awardees were selected from a large pool of university and national laboratory-based applicants and selection was based on peer review by outside scientific experts. To be eligible for the DOE award, a researcher must be an untenured, tenure-track assistant or associate professor at a U.S. academic institution or a full-time employee at a DOE national laboratory having received a Ph.D. within the past 10 years. A list of the 84 awardees, their institutions, and titles of research projects is appended and is also available on the Early Career Research Program website.